I Fail to Achieve Divinity

So it was a gloomy day on this gloomy, ramshackle freighter chugging over a gray, listless sea.  The freighter was this old rustbucket, World War II vintage maybe, 5000 tons or less.  My fellow passengers were listless, and all they wanted to do was talk about their deeply uninteresting lives while rattling the ice in their highballs.  The crew were mostly silent.  The sky was swathed in dark cloud. The weird thing was that just behind us was a much more impressive ship, a beautiful white st...